Chapter Text
The day Satoru Gojo was born, dozens of people had died.
His mother had pushed him out of herself with one last agonized scream, before her heart stopped, and she went cold and still, still stained with blood and placental fluids.
The woman who had taken him, his distant aunt, had raised him in the air not noticing the state of the woman lying before her, the strong body of the child in her steady hands and a smile on her face. She'd frowned at his face, unable to feel any kind of cursed energy, the child silent and still.
And a second later, she'd found herself on the ground, her face fixed in that same expression, her hands reduced to the bone up to her elbows, her body lacerated, soon flanked alongside those of the other women in the room.
Satoru Gojo had opened his eyes, illuminating the dim room with a celestial light, and his relatives and nurses had died just hearing his first cry.
His father had felt his own body shaking, vertigo creeping up and weakening his legs, the air shifting position.
For a second, the earth's center of gravity shifted, and the world changed.
With a baby's first cry, a blank face, and endless eyes, everything had changed.
The first people who entered the room found a lake of blood.
The descendant of the clan head glanced indifferently at the corpse of his wife, lying motionless on the bed, focusing on nothing but the child, who was now watching them from where he had fallen.
Still surrounded by blood, bright eyes in a pinkish face that followed them as they moved around the room.
He stared critically at the form of his father who reached down to pick him up.
The man lifted the child, and tried to remember the pressure he'd felt a few minutes ago, and found he couldn't remember it. He smiled as his cousins rushed to call the clan head, unaware of the fate they would meet, soon.
The day Satoru Gojo was born was engraved in everyone's memory, even Satoru's own.
The Six Eyes had changed the world.
Satoru Gojo knew that.
He had always been aware of his role.
From the words of his father, who put him in front of people older by decades, to laugh at them when his son with his frail, little body ended up knocking them down without the slightest effort, and to praise him by squeezing his shoulder in a lethal grip, reminding him again and again of how the the entire clan still celebrated the birth of the Six Eyes.
From the looks and curtsies of his clan, who bowed as he passed, who secretly whispered his name like it was some kind of prayer, as if Satoru was a real God.
And maybe he was.
Satoru watched, as the trembling midwife fed him, until he was able to do it himself, but when he was already capable of producing enough evil energy to bring her to tears.
Satoru watched the few remaining members of his clan, and knew everything.
He closed his eyes, and felt everything.
When his technique manifested, Infinity destroyed everything.
And it was no longer Gojo Satoru of the Gojo clan, but Gojo Satoru, the child prodigy, the only one, the strongest.
⸻
The day Gojo Satoru met Masamichi Yaga, the man felt immense pity for that boy, and for anyone else who would have anything to do with him.
For a fifteen years old, he was incredibly tall, nearly as tall as Yaga was, despite the nineteen years between them. His eyes were covered in white bandages that encircled his head, partially hidden by incredibly messy pale hair, and his physique the one of a warrior raised in a training room, with broad shoulders and strong muscles.
And the face-and manners, of a boy.
He was to be Yaga's student, along with a girl with a unique reverse cursed technique and a young man who came from a family of non-sorcerers, gifted with the ability to absorb and control curses.
Against the only second year, Ieiri Utahime, and the completely absent (dead on mission) third-years, it was the class with the most students in four years.
And Yaga knew it would've been a disaster since the start of the spring.
⸻
Suguro Geto arrived at his "new school and new home" as he would have at any other occasion.
Presenting himself with significantly longer hair compared to other boys his age, his favorite pair of earrings (simple, black, but that were visible against his pale skin from feet away) and with pale cargo covered up to mid-thigh by an oversized black t-shirt with a random print on it.
Before even giving him a uniform, his new teacher (who had eyed him critically but indifferently) led him to his new class, to his new classmates.
Whom he was set to live with for three years.
If he didn't die earlier, of course.
The girl, wearing a blue skirt and the most neutral expression he'd ever seen, looked at him with a raised eyebrow and turned away again, much more interested in what was outside the windows, apparently.
The boy, probably the most beautiful boy- the most beautiful human being he had ever seen, tilted his head to observe him with something akin to curiosity, and was able to destroy with a few words whatever thoughts Suguru had been having about him.
Good, thoughts. Appreciative ones. Decidedly.
The other had snow-white hair, as pale as his skin, long enough to reach his neck and messy beyond measure. White bandages covered his eyes, without hiding his straight and austere nose, and his bent position didn't hide his well-trained physique, surely taller than that of Suguru himself.
And the hand that held up his cheek was large, the fingers long and the bones jutting out, the veins dark enough against the snow of his skin that they were more than visible as they run over his forearms, left uncovered.
"Yaga-senseei, did the guy get knocked up by a curse? Because there's a lot of suspicious cursed energy from down there, you know. A lot. You didn't mistake an actual curse with an human, did you?"
Suguru gave the boy a cold glare.
The boy smiled at him cheekily.
"This is Geto Suguru. His technique allows him to ingest curses and control them as he wishes and needs."
"Oh, wow. How the hell did you find out you could do it?"
"Shut up, Gojo. I don't want to hear you say another word."
Geto Suguru discovered that Satoru Gojo was an extremely irritating, spoiled kid.
A spoiled kid, extremely irritating and extremely powerful.
And extremely beautiful, as everyone could see.
It seemed that the boy could do nothing without excelling, a cheeky smirk always on his face, eyes filled with annoying condescension and conspicuously false empathy when it came to everyone else.
Suguru started to dislike many things about him.
Satoru Gojo was very good at math- because yes, they studied math at the Tokyo Metropolitan Curse Technical College.
They couldn't go around killing curses and saving people if they couldn't solve an equation, and that gave Suguru some relief, since he didn't want to live among monkeys who didn't care about anything but being heroes and saving the day.
And in any scientific subject, in fucking math, Satoru Gojo was a genius.
He could solve the most difficult assignment with the calm of someone who's watching a movie stretched out on his couch, rather than resolving a quadratic equation in a semi-deserted classroom, or talk about chemical reactions like he was gossiping with a friend about the new girl he liked.
Where Satoru Gojo was good at math, Suguru Geto aced literature.
Upon finding out, Satoru Gojo had raised an elegant, polished eyebrow, judgmental clear in his face.
He had never seen the other's eyebrows.
(Suguru had realized how strange it was to think something like that of someone else as soon as the thought crossed his mind. And after that, he avoided looking at him all day, the same question buzzing in his head.
What's under those bandages?
Suguru didn't understand why he felt the way he did, but boy if that guy annoyed him more than anything in the world.)
If Suguru felt a fascination, impossible to ignore, for the tormented souls of the people of their culture and their world, a sense of belonging that destroyed him and healed him at the same time, Satoru Gojo thought that there was nothing interesting in studying for hours the life and past of men (dead men, most of the time).
Once, Suguru nearly threw his chair at him after Suguru interrupted their kyōgen kigo lecture once again. Yaga scolded him (with a victorious smirk on his face, and giving him a thumbs-up when no one was looking), and Shoko smiled in amusement before jabbing at Satoru Gojo.
"Could a chair even hit The Strongest? I say it can, and this nice city boy will prove it."
Gojo's only answer had been a neutral "Try it, if you're really so confident in yourself", that had made Suguru seethe.
Satoru Gojo didn't train with them, not really.
Shoko Ieiri explained Gojo's situation to Suguru with her usual amount of boredom.
"He's a member, well he's the only member, of one of the most important families in jujutsu society."
"So what? He can't train with us normal people?"
"He can't, since he's quite literally the strongest person in the world, curses included"
And, oh. All right. Everyone was serious about this 'strongest' business.
Gojo was even sent on different missions, after more powerful curses, too dangerous even for the first grades, but this didn't worry anyone, because their superiors didn't make an habit out of being wrong.
Until they made a mistake.
Suguro Geto had known Satoru Gojo for two months now, and he hated him with all his heart.
After two months of knowing each other, Shoko Ieiri and Suguru Geto were sent on a mission together, Suguru's last mission before they'd have paired him with their only senpai, Iori Utahime.
They were to inspect an abandoned hospital in the suburbs of Tokyo, a place Suguru could guess was still horrendous.
He had gone to the hospital once as a child, when he'd broken his arm falling down the stairs, and he remembered the extremely tired and courteous faces of the doctors, ready to shield him from those parts of the structure that he shouldn't have seen, that he had visited anyway.
Full of crying and pain and pity and achingly sad acceptance.
He couldn't imagine how many curses there would be.
A first-grade curse had thrust itself in front of them.
The most powerful curse Geto had ever ingested was a second grade, and it had made him spend the entire night hunched over the toilet bowl, his mouth thick with that awful taste and his mind blank, sense filled with the feeling of filth.
Not that the Institute knew, since it had happened before they found him, but he would never forget it.
Ieiri had looked shocked for a second, before letting out a single shaky breath, and telling him with a smile that "she'd never wanted to die with a loser like him," making him realize two things.
One, he'd never seen that girl express anything other than disinterest or prickly amusement.
Two, Ieiri Shoko was in more danger than him even with his injured leg, and she was way less expendable, because she was a promising doctor, with her extraordinary technique that would one day turn her capable of amazing things. Not many sorcerers could do the things she did.
Suguru, on the other hand, was more than expendable.
And the curse thought so too.
It walked over to them, muttering in a low voice with its eyes closed, “Not now, not now, not now, too soon” like a mantra, and it sent a shiver down his spine, but now they had their backs against the wall.
And suddenly there was no curse. There was no wall behind it, and the wind whipped on his face from the fifth floor.
There was Satoru Gojo, with his back to them.
Looking back after years, Suguru Geto still remembered the thing he noticed first. His messy hair was blowing in the wind, and at his feet was a small mass of white bandages.
Then Satoru Gojo had turned around, and Suguru Geto had perhaps met him for the first time.
Suguru Geto was a romantic, and he believed in many things. With Satoru Gojo he didn't know what to believe. But if it was true that his eyes were the mirror of the soul, Satoru Gojo had the purest and sharpest soul in the universe.
Dark, slightly dilated pupils stared into his, almost made invisible by the surrounding light.
Suguru had never seen something so beautiful. Irises so beautiful, so pure and clear that no words could describe them.
Just, simply, indescribable.
A winter sky still dirtied by clouds and marked by a delicate but sharp rainbow, when the sun comes out shyly and the air is wet and cold and no one can get out. The winter sky that somehow gets too bright to see, and the water that sparkles in your eyes. Cold wind whipping your face, your knees sunk in snow too thick to be defeated by a weak daytime star.
They reminded him of the time he'd gone out just after Christmas, alone in his neighborhood.
The fresh snow had crunched, and above his head seven colors had shone like in a movie, to illuminate his soft face and full smile.
"Damn, who was stupid enough to sent you here alone? Yaga will get so angry, I'm gonna have to thank them!"
There was something mocking in his voice, but Suguru couldn't be mad it, not when he was still staring into those eyes.
"Did you come by to be the hero, Gojo? Do it for real then, our friend here got a little hurt, he can't take you place."
Not that he felt a thing, thanks to the adrenaline still in his veins. He probably wouldn't have calmed down in twelve hours yet.
"Oh really?" Satoru Gojo had approached him, and blown some hair out of his eyes, smiling with those shiny teeth straight out of a toothpaste commercials. "I hope the hero doesn't want my life after this."
In one quick move he reached down, and grabbing Suguru's arm, wrapped it around his own shoulders and neck. Satoru Gojo's hand grabbed his waist, and he held him still.
Suguru vaguely noticed that he smelled nice despite the rubble and dirt.
He wouldn't made an attempt on his life, he decided right there and then.
⸻
Satoru Gojo was different from everyone else, and he was different from his classmates, and he was more than aware of it.
He could tell, by the searching looks they sent his way when they thought he couldn't see them, the cold ones whenever they sent Satoru on solo assignments, whenever the school was visited by a higher up, the more asshole-ish ones who who didn't hesitate to interrupt their lessons and take him away with cold, demanding orders.
Satoru could never be like Suguru Geto.
Suguru Geto was an idealist.
Once, by chance, he'd heard him talk to Shoko Ieiri, as they walked to the dormitories (where Satoru spent very little time) in the middle of the night after a mission that had left him unscathed, telling her about why he was there.
And maybe Suguru Geto had some sort of hero complex, with all of his "who is strong should protect the weak" reasoning.
On the other hand, Satoru Gojo didn't have a real set of morals, and he was aware of it.
His life was filled with nothing but curses and strength, and there was no room for anything else, and he understood that. He accepted it, despite how much he yearned for the freedom that shone in Suguru Geto's dark earrings, in his clothes, in his indifference towards Satoru.
In his face.
Perhaps he was the simplest and most beautiful person he had ever seen, and Satoru knew all the heirs of the great sorcerers families, from the younger ones to the creepy thirty-year-olds who didn't think it strange to try courting him anyway, blabbering about the honor of being the strongest , the angel of their time.<br />
There was something hard about his features, severe and austere but also young, as if to remind him that up until a few months ago those cheeks had been full, that the clear scars on his forehead had been caused by adolescent acne, that there was still that last bit of naivety and innocence in his warm eyes.
Warm.
Suguru Geto was warm. Warm like the early morning summer sun, that gets ready to burn the skin of the world in a few hours, but that for now rests as it rises. Satoru wondered if Suguru Geto would ever burn him.
Sometimes he'd felt an irrational desire to touch his hair with his own fingers. Maybe twist a dark strand between them and pull it up, bring the other closer.
How Suguru Geto could have such disgusting technique and be so handsome and composed was a secret to him. But it was a powerful technique. Never as powerful as Satoru's, but so powerful, so impressive, more than anyone else he knew, and he just- stood out among dozens of pathetic people.
Pathetic people, who flattered him like he was a god and hailed him like the angel he apparently was in their eyes.
Suguru Geto had straight out insulted him, several times.
With that beautiful face of his twisted by anger and his cold eyes focused on Satoru. Satoru liked the fact that Suguru Geto looked at him, and he liked to annoy him.
So yes, if to be looked at by those dark gems, that shined bright with excitement and interest when he was talking about that boring literature he loved so much, Satoru had to speak ill of it, Satoru would do it.
(Perhaps Shoko Ieiri had noticed, but he cared little for her.
She had a strong technique that almost made her immortal and would save many lives in the future. But she was of little interest to him.)
In the end, Satoru was there with them just because of the elders' beloved bureaucratic bullshit.
There was no real reason for him to go to school.
He would live with his peers, with whom he wouldn't have interacted anyway, and would be under the jurisdiction of people much weaker than him, who would keep their guard up and observe him with fear, with envious admiration, with annoyance and ill-concealed anger and helplessness.
He would watch Suguru Geto and Ieiri Shoko from a distance, with curiosity, envying their freedoms and the pride they felt for their own progress.
With pity for the end they would meet if they didn't become strong enough.
If there was one thing Satoru Gojo didn't love, it was saving lives.
Saving a human being, someone so different from him, someone that realized they were facing a god as soon as they saw him.
Who looked at him gratefully, admiring his eyes, thanking him, and when faced with that gratitude Satoru couldn't help but wish he'd let them die.
Why was everyone so damn weak? Why did they need to be constantly helped? Why did they need someone? Why did they need him? Why couldn't they be as strong as he was? Why couldn't he be as weak as they were, and let someone else save him?
Why?
When Satoru saved Suguru Geto he got nothing.
Suguru Geto looked into his eyes, those omnipresent, all-seeing eyes that knew everything, that Suguru was seeing for the first time, and there was no gratitude in his own warm dark eyes.
There was only surprise, and something Satoru couldn't understand, that he'd never seen before.
Suguru Geto let his own warmth meet the chill of Satoru's omnipotence, and Satoru Gojo found himself completely powerless in the face of something like that.